


Reflections

by thesecretdetectivecollection



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Gen, Liverpool FC players - Freeform, Liverpool fc - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-09-03 17:03:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8721718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesecretdetectivecollection/pseuds/thesecretdetectivecollection
Summary: Martin reflects on the way the team's changed, from the boys who knew when he came in, to the boys in the dressing room now.





	

Martin has been here a long time. It feels like it’s been a lifetime and the blink of an eye all at once. He only has to look around the dressing room to be reminded of how long it’s been. Of the players who were here to greet him on his first day, only one has been left standing. 

As if he can sense the direction of Martin’s thoughts, Lucas looks up and shoots him a sunshiney smile. Maybe he can read minds. Martin honestly wouldn’t be that surprised. You just can’t be _that_ good with people, surely? Then again, if anyone could, it would be Lucas. 

He breaks away from Lucas and glances around the rest of the dressing room. How sad is it that he can remember every single one of them coming in on their first day? The English players had the advantage there. They always knew each other from international duty, and they could tease and joke and banter with each other and the manager, so they settled in pretty fast. The young players took awhile to get over their awe and be confident enough to be themselves. The internationals always took longer, trying to figure out the language, and even rudimentary English wasn’t much help when Scousers were around, changing the shapes and sounds of all the words and throwing them around so fast. 

Yes, he’s been here a long, long time. He thinks of his son, and how Pedro Leiva is one of his son’s best friends. He thinks of the Scouse accents his kids speak with. He thinks about the fans, who joke that he eats nails for breakfast, that he goes into Burger King, orders a Big Mac, and gets it. 

It’s getting near the end of April now, and the rumor mill is going into overdrive. Almost every player Liverpool has is being linked with some other club, or worse,  being saddled with some vague suspicion of being unable to compete with whatever stars are incoming ( _Stars_ , Martin thinks derisively, _more like meteors, changing the entire makeup of the team. Like the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs._ He ignores the voice in his head that tells him he’s being unnecessarily bitter.)

He can admit to being worried, here in the privacy of his own head. He hasn’t started in awhile, and for all the manager’s talk about squad depth and managing player exhaustion, the annual trickle of doubt has started up again in his mind. After Dagger had been sold (and he still misses Dagger, sometimes), Martin knew anyone could be. After all, Dagger had basically carved the badge into his heart, had adopted the city and the people with all the fierce loyalty of, well, of a Great Dane. Martin snickered to himself. 

It had been bad last summer when Lucas had called him up in August, told him frankly that he wasn’t sure what was going on, but he would do his damnedest to stay. Lucas was a good guy like that. He’d thought Martin had the right to know, and while Martin himself wasn’t sure he did, he appreciated the thought quite a lot. 

How had it come to this? He remembered playing with Dagger years ago, being called the best centre-back pairing in the league. He remembers not that long ago, when he was the most prolific goalscoring defender (SASASAS, people had joked–Suarez and Sturridge and Sterling and Skrtel. He frowned at the thought of Sterling, another young ego inflated too fast too early by the press).

He figured he’d wait until the season ended, then he’d go have a chat with the boss. Kloppo seemed the type to be honest about the situation, whether he had no choice, or he had the choice to stay, but he might not play much, or whether all the worry was utter nonsense in the back of his head. 

There’s nothing he can do at the minute anyway, really. He fucking hates transfer windows. He also hates that the press start their stupid rumormongering a month and a half in advance. _It’s fucking ridiculous, it is_. (He can almost hear Stevie saying the words, almost wants to turn around to nod at him and agree. But Stevie’s not there anymore.) As he looks up, the dressing room is slowly emptying as the boys (and they are all seem to be boys now, so very _young_ ) filter out to the pitch. 

Lucas is looking at him again, and Martin wonders if Stevie had a talk with Lucas about looking out for the boys when he left, or if the Brazilian just took that task on for himself. Lucas looks at him, and for once, he’s not beaming. But there is a steady reassurance in his eyes, mixed in with understanding (Lucas of all people knows this particular feeling well, Martin suspects). They hold the eye contact for a moment, before Lucas drops a hand onto Martin’s shoulder. 

“Alright?” he asks, in that light Brazilian-Scouse accent. He’s utterly unintimidated by the tall, tattooed, shaven-headed Slovakian, though that’s understandable after sharing a dressing room for nine years. (Some of the young lads are a bit shy around Martin their first couple of days, which he and the other players find utterly hilarious.)

 “Yeah, alright,” he says, smiling up at Lucas. He stands and they go out to training together. 


End file.
